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Monday, February 07, 2011

Orci, Welker Talk Transformers: Prime

In separate interviews, Transformers: Prime executive producer Bob Orci and Frank Welker (voice of Megatron) promote the upcoming return of Prime to the airwaves. The various interviews seem to be part of a press screening that occurred in California for the show. In the MTV interview (video below) Orci talks about the character of Arcee. ToonZone.net was only on site and provide a summary of the Q&A session with Orci and Jeff Cline and The Hub executives. MTV was also able to interview the voice of Megatron (and tons of other characters) in a brief walk down memory lane of his legendary career and how he does all those characters. That full interview can be found here.

The Q&A highlights:- Why Bumblebee can't speak will be revealed in season two.- Due to budgeting, only a limited number of characters will be created. (The CGI models are labor intensive, same thing occured with Beast Wars and Beast Machines).- Kline says: "When we kill a character, we kill a character." (So no Cliffjumper return)- Line would not confirm if Soundwave's detachable drone is Laserbeak, calling it a "homage".- There will be toys (see next blog post).- Events in the history of Cybertron and the civil war will be used later in the series.

Few portions of Welker interview:Geek: How is Megatron being handled in Prime? How’s he different from previous iterations?

FW: I think first, physically when you look at Megatron, he’s quite a bit different: he doesn’t have the gun on his arm like he did in G1 and now he’s a jet fighter and he’s a little bit different in the Prime series [in that] he has a slightly different look, but when you look at him you go, “Oh yeah, that’s Megatron!”

But the character—in the writing—they want to go deeper into the evil side of him and what’s driving him. He has this desperate need to take over Cybertron and the Earth, so the extent he will go to get what he wants is now more evident in the dialog. So I can now emphasize that in the balance in the voice. It’s countering Peter’s [Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime] good voice, and also you see a little bit different going on with Optimus Prime.

So the characters—I guess you could say there’s a lot more latitude in what they’re doing, and it makes it a little more interesting and a little different than some of our other iterations.